Navigating internal and external barriers to success
What does a new rep need to understand to be quickly effective? At the end of the day, reps want access to information. They want to understand who they should contact and what they should say from the beginning to the end. They want to know where to find prospects, what they look like, and what to tell them. They want to know what resources are available to them, and what they need to do to book a deal. They want marketing collateral that actually correlates to what the prospect needs to understand. They want to know where the competitive speed bumps are, and what tactics and strategies have worked to overcome them. Most importantly, they want to be able to react to a rapidly changing situation within a sales cycle. Quite often, the rep who responds with references, proposals or other vital information required by the customer is the one who wins the deal. Understanding the tools and stages within your sales process will make your reps much more effective than teaching them a new sales methodology, or sitting them in front of a motivational speaker.
But what usually happens? Unless you’ve got a significant training budget, most sales rep education is done by a manager. Since the manager has a lot of other things on their plate, they usually pass a lot of brochures to the rep to read, and then send them on their way. They might toss them a few leads and hope the rep can pick it up quick. Sometimes the manager has never even sold the product before, and can’t even articulate the potential challenges in the sales cycle. Or, the new rep might attend a training class, which consists of a product manager droning on about the technical specifications of the product, or how to use the multi million dollar Sales Force Automation tool your company just installed.
Imagine if you could document the vision of your founder, the knowledge of your Product Management team, the articulation of your VP of Marketing, and the experiences of your most successful sales representatives. Now consider that you could have that person work with every new sales rep in the company until the rep was highly skilled and successful. Until cloning is further along, we’ll have to settle with taking the knowledge of these people and documenting it in a Sales Playbook for everyone in your organization involved in the sales cycle. This Sales Playbook will provide the following measurable benefits to your company:
- Improvement in sales rep effectiveness
- Reduction is sales rep turnover
- Increased sales rep productivity
- Better sales forecasting
- Better channel effectiveness
- Expose weaknesses in the current sales process
- Help you identify the right type of sales candidate to hire
- Improve your competitiveness
- Faster sales cycles
- Happier, more informed customers
When you build a Sales Playbook, you are planning for sales engagements. You are planning for every contingency known, and providing your team with the proper tools and tactics for them to be successful. You are diagramming every experience, so that future reps walking the same path will be prepared to win business.
The process looks different to everyone in the organization, especially to employees who are not sales people. A visionary CEO knows that all their employees working together successfully will make a huge difference in the success of the organization. If the employees understand the sales process, they can focus the efforts of their job to improving the ability to close deals. Mapping the process will give everyone a common language, and a historical record of success.
By documenting your Sales Playbook, you will enjoy a significant competitive advantage. You will help your sales reps navigate the maze of internal and external barriers to success. Building your Sales Playbook will give your company an accepted and documented historical record of your successes, and a historical record of the activities of your successful sales reps.
In some marketing departments, collateral is written in a vacuum, without understanding the needs of the sales rep, or the interests and questions of the customer. The product management group responsible for creating and updating the product never knows or understands what bells and whistles are most compelling to the customer, or what new features customers are demanding, based upon information gathered during sales cycles. Senior management often does not understand their role in the sales cycle or how forecasting is tied into the sales cycle. Customers want you to make it easy for them to buy your solution, the solution that makes what they’re doing faster, more efficient and more productive. People and businesses are being hit with an avalanche of solicitations for products and services. Quite often, they’re so busy keeping their own company afloat that they don’t have much time to consider what it is you’re offering. Customers also are overwhelmed by information. While they have access to nearly limitless information about possible solutions to their problems via the internet, that information will most likely cause confusion. What they are looking for is a knowledgeable and ethical sales person with answers to their needs. That rep will get the sale. Is it possible to build your Sales Playbook? Absolutely! Many companies have this information, but it is stored in documents, computers and brains.
